Comments on: Strategy, Winston Churchill, and the power of positive thinkinghttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656
Sat, 17 Feb 2018 14:48:20 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4By: Grurrayhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-126028
Fri, 11 Oct 2013 18:51:24 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-126028RE: comment 17 – I am considering creating a portfolio. It will be called “comments by Lynn Rees that deserve to be their own blog posts.”
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they tend to look like an outline for a book not just a blog post
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Churchill wasn’t just protecting obsolete British possessions, but he was a constant advocate of the time honored British peripheral strategy. They honed it through their use of naval power against easy colonial targets, and it was an appealing option given their disastrous experiences in direct conflict in World War I. In addition to the European “soft underbelly”, he was also interested in a campaign through Norway which may or may not have lead to nowhere.
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This was in contrast to the American charge-up-the-hill way of war.
And by that time we had the mass and concentration and the ways and means to plow through the front door.
]]>By: T. Greerhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125993
Fri, 11 Oct 2013 03:04:19 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125993RE: comment 17 – I am considering creating a portfolio. It will be called “comments by Lynn Rees that deserve to be their own blog posts.”
]]>By: carlhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125975
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:16:10 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125975This is a fine piece, the point of which is simple (and colorfully illustrated by Marshall’s story), the ultimate strategic wisdom of-Don’t Give Up, Keep Fighting, ’cause you never know! That is one of those things that everybody knows, but have to keep learning; that nobody forgets but must constantly be reminded of.

Hey Zen, did you ever get around to reading Conquest by Hugh Thomas? You gotta read that.
]]>By: Madhuhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125951
Thu, 10 Oct 2013 13:53:15 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125951Good points, Zen. I should have been more clear in my comments (like that is ever going to happen with my stream of online babbling). I was thinking more about propaganda and mythology than what really happened. Basically, what Lynn said. No, really, I’m not just saying that to sound more smarter or anything!
]]>By: larrydunbarhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125911
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 22:07:55 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125911“Everything else, as FDR intended, became our problem. ”

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But then when did it become not our problem? In the first Iraqi war, under BushI, we once again became the Black and Tans of the Kuwaitis, and later under BushII, when he opened up the U.S treasury to private corporations, we sort of became a privatization version of the Black and Tans, again in Iraq.

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What do you think is next? We become a privatized version of the Black and Tans for China in the Pacific? Or do you think the sheep in Congress will ever stop jumping of the cliffs, like the rest of the lemmings, in the business of getting elected? 🙂

An international policy to support the White Russians and, in Winston Churchill‘s words, “to strangle at birth the Bolshevik State” became increasingly unpopular in Britain. In January 1919 the Daily Express was echoing public opinion when, paraphrasing Bismarck, it exclaimed, “the frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier”.

In February 1919, two sergeants from the British Yorkshire Regiment were court-martialled and given life sentences for refusing to fight. From April 1919, the inability to hold the flanks and mutinies in the ranks of the White Russian forces caused the Allies to decide to leave.

Churchill’s fallback plan, fighting the Bolshies to the last American, was even more problematic:

Following the Allied Armistice with Germany on November 11, 1918, family members and friends of the ANREF soldiers began writing letters to newspapers and circulating petitions to their representatives in the U.S. Congress asking for the immediate return of the ANREF from North Russia. In turn, the newspapers editorialized for their withdrawal and their Congressmen raised the issue in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, aware of not only the change in their mission, but also of the Armistice on the Western Front and the fact that the port of Arkhangelsk was now frozen and closed to shipping, the morale of the American soldiers soon plummeted. They would ask their officers for the reason they were fighting Bolshevik soldiers in Russia and would not receive a specific answer other than they must fight to survive and avoid being pushed into the Arctic Ocean by the Bolshevik army.

Early in 1919, instances of rumored and actual mutinies in the Allied ranks became frequent. President Wilson directed his War Department on February 16, 1919 to begin planning the ANREF’s withdrawal from North Russia. In March 1919, four American soldiers in Company B of the 339th Infantry drew up a petition protesting their continued presence in Russia and were threatened with court-martial proceedings. U.S. Army Brigadier General Wilds P. Richardson arrived in Arkhangelsk aboard the icebreaker Canada on April 17, 1919, with orders from General Pershing to organize a coordinated withdrawal of the American troops “at the earliest possible moment”. On May 26, 1919, the first half of 8,000 volunteer members of the British North Russian Relief Force arrived in Arkhangelsk to relieve the American troops. In early June, the bulk of the ANREF sailed for Brest, France and then forNew York City and home, which for two-thirds of them was in the state of Michigan. During the withdrawal, the men of the ANREF decided to call themselves “Polar Bears” and were authorized to wear the Polar Bear insignia on their left sleeve. The ANREF was officially disbanded on August 5, 1919.

Several years after the American troops were withdrawn from Russia, President Warren G. Harding called the expedition a mistake and blamed the previous administration.

Given Bolshie weakness in 1918-1919, it was the best time to stamp out that regime. Given the weakness of the outside intervening powers, it was also the worst time to stamp out that regime. Pi?sudski, Ludendorff, and others besides Churchill had opportunities to crush the viper’s brood in the nest and passed for reasons that made political sense at the time. Future Cold Warriors, including Poles and Germans, would have voted for expelling the Bolshies from the Kremlin then but the future rarely gets a representative vote in political questions.

What was Churchill to do? That he kept British meddling in Russia going for as long as he did was miraculous. Was he supposed to spread FreikorpsBlack and Tans over northern Russia and pray for victory? He couldn’t even hold on to a small island right next store to his own that England had been meddling with since 1171. They were playing defense against domestic Reds in the end anyway.

To expect this nation, which had never intervened on a large scale in Eurasia before and who pre-August 1914 would have thought American intervention in north Russia in 1919 as likely as American intervention in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 1919, to have carried out an anti-Bolshie crusade, strains credulity. In the tension between Promised Land and Crusader State, the U.S. has to walk a fine line between going out in search of monsters to destroy and keeping its fractious population together. The U.S. at the end of WWI was far more concerned with keeping the Promised Land free of Red infection than Crusader Stating in the frozen north.

Fascism, as the Peiping Regime’s current success shows, is a far more dangerous proposition for English-flavored republicanism than Leninist-Stalinism. Fascism has enough economic flexibility to be more dynamic then Leninist-Stalinist attempts at central planning and enough authoritarianism to achieve short-run political concentration than 20C liberal regimes have difficulty achieving. It has elite appeal because it offers the prospect to Western elites of gaining control over their messy masses while keeping all of their toys without necessarily having to hide their dachas in the woods.

Chamberlain had tried to deter Fascism by using an aggressive arms build up to intimidate Hitler. After the outbreak of war, the plan was to besiege Germany by placing it under land and sea blockade and waiting it to crumble again. It is appropriate that siege comes from the Latin sedere meaning “to sit”: sitzkrieg was an appropriate strategy. Hitler’s larger strategy of Lebensraum was a response to counter the specific conditions of 1919-1920 blockade-induced famine by carving an autarkic economic block out of Europe that could match the West in economies of scale and resist Western sieges of central Europe. Fortunately for him, the West left a large hole in the middle of their anti-Nazi cordone sanitaire and let him cause more mischief than Germany’s resources warranted based purely on its balance sheet.

Churchill, once he came to power, needed cannon fodder for his crusade since reliable British manpower reserves didn’t exist (they had India but it wasn’t reliable if reliability is measured in pliability to British political interests). As Randolph Churchill wrote of his father:

I went up to my father’s bedroom. He was standing in front of his basin and was shaving with his old fashioned Valet razor. He had a tough beard, and was as usual hacking away.

“Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving .’”

I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half-turned and said: “I think I see my way through.”

He resumed shaving.

I was astounded, and said: “Do you mean we can avoid defeat (which seemed credible), or beat the bastards (which seemed incredible)?”

He flung his razor into the basin, swung around, and said: “Of course I mean we can beat them.’”

Me: “Well I’m all for that, but I don’t see how you can do it.”

By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning around to me, said with great intensity: “I shall drag the United States in.”

After Pearl Harbor, Churchill spent the next years trying to use the Americans to Black and Tan the Soviets (When it was suggested he continue to court the Americans gently after Pearl Harbor, Churchill quipped, “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her. Now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!”)while pursuing increasingly obsolete British colonial interests, much of which centered on trying to use American boys to force the Ljubljana Gap in the mountainous “soft underbelly” of Europe. Towards the end of the war, Stalin teased Churchill by proposing a joint Ljubljana Gap operation. Churchill reddened. Among practicing geopoliticians, this is the equivalent of BURN!!!. (He curiously opposed a landing on the one piece of Mediterranean-facing geography that provided a clear path to the North European Plain AKA where every major war since Charles the Rash had been decided).

FDR had a general sense of where he was going. Spheres of influence legitimized in his League of Nations++ (originally the Four Policeman, now the Security Council P5). Replacement of direct European colonial administration with indirect American dollar diplomacy. American financial and economic domination. &tc. But FDR’s practice was chronic deviousness to keep open all options until the moment was right i.e. he didn’t want his left hand to know what his right hand was doing. He also assumed he’d be around to handle Uncle Joe. He was wrong and whatever plans he had followed him to the grave. While Stalin had overseen committees to plan Soviet domination down to the last detail since 1942, Roosevelt’s preference for preserving his freedom of action in the face of uncertain American domestic politics left his successor with little planning (for all that it may have been worth).

Like Hannibal, we know how to win a battle but not how to use it, primarily because the use creates domestic fractures at home (the original rationale for “no entangling alliances”). Foreign sirens from Churchill to Chalabi have proven adept at exploiting the void. For Churchill, Truman proved more amenable to becoming a Black and Tan than FDR. Ike, who know Churchill, used Suez to ensure America would never be Black and Tanned again. Given British weakness and his general strategic ineptitude, Churchill played a weak political hand as well as he could. He achieved a lesser victory than he hoped but a notable goal nonetheless: better an American poodle than a German cur.

Everything else, as FDR intended, became our problem. Vae victoribus.

]]>By: Grurrayhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125894
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 16:30:11 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125894” No sign that America would come in”
Isolationists and Neutralists and some Progressives were hard at work trying to keep the US out of the war, but FDR was always firmly behind the alignment that made up our wartime alliance.
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He got the Neutrality Act watered down so he could impose an embargo on Italy after they invaded Ethiopia, gave the famous “Quarantine Speech” in 1937, and by the end of 1939 enabled an Anglo-French arms purchasing pipeline based out of Washington.
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It began out of political necessity. FDR made some crucial economic policy mistakes when he first came in office and had to play catch up by agreeing to some monetary and trade deals with France, the UK, and the USSR in the mid 30’s. Also, to add to Zen’s comments, the influential treasury secretary Henry Morgantheau, certainly no fan of the Germans, was intent on making the interbellum reforms in monetary policy a worldwide system.
Finally, FDR had to deal with the threat of destabilization and sabotage with vague fascist ties which probably set him against the Axis very early on.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
]]>By: zenhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125889
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:52:03 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125889Hi Doc Madhu,
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For the Roosevelt administration, the issue of India – to the extent it was an issue – was not anti-commmunism or self-government, but Imperial Preference, as in the rest of the Empire. Cordell Hull wanted US foreign policy to be to reverse the global economic damage of Hawley-Smoot and various autarkic regimes and move the world to freer trade. The British and French empires were in the way, being in essence, an international system of protectionist regimes that put US exports at a disadvantage. This is why the Atlantic Charter talks stressed to Churchill the price of American alliance would be the opening up of British commonwealth and colonies to American trade. American anti-imperialism in this period was rooted in commercial imperatives ( really future imperatives, as exports were a miniscule part of GDP at the time though there were already growing concerns about strategic resources, namely rubber and oil, even in the 20’s)
]]>By: Madhuhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125888
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:20:12 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125888Between 1942 and 1945, the British government conducted a propaganda campaign in the United States to create popular consensus for a postwar Anglo-American partnership. Anticipating an Allied victory, British officials feared American cooperation would end with the war. Susan A. Brewer provides the first study of Britain’s attempts to influence an American public skeptical of postwar international commitment, even as the United States was replacing Britain as the leading world power. Brewer discusses the concerns and strategies of the British propagandists–journalists, professors, and businessmen–who collaborated with the generally sympathetic American media. She examines the narratives they used to link American and British interests on such controversial issues as the future of the empire and economic recovery. In analyzing the barriers to Britain’s success, she considers the legacy of World War I, and the difficulty of conducting propaganda in a democracy. Propaganda did not prevent the transition of global leadership from the British Empire to the United States, Brewer asserts, but it did make that transition work in Britain’s interest. –
(Amazon blurb) To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States During World War II, Susan A. Brewer.
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No, I haven’t gone all “Pankaj Mishra” on you. That guy, LOL! I am being true to the Anglosphere concept (LEX! JIM BENNET!).
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What I mean is a different strategic story needs to be told (of course I will love the Freedman book, it seems made for my tastes, doesn’t it?), one rooted in the individual, one where we don’t need to pretend that serious errors of Anglosphere history were anything other than what they were.
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Given my intellectual online “radicalization” via the “South Asian” papers (once again, I am no Arundhati Roy, ugh!), I sometimes forget that there are British people that kind of lost their history in the contemporary fights over colonialism and anti-colonialism. There is an Indian oral historian that is collecting stories and displaying them online. If you have any family connection to the subcontinent, tell us your story of grandfathers and grandmothers and great aunts and great uncles and the story is collected.
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At this level, it’s family stories and everyone belongs. Everyone.
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New strategic stories. It’s not the cold war anymore, we don’t need to pretend about certain failures of the past. We can be honest now and we can be human about it.
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Eh, I like to play around with ideas.
]]>By: Madhuhttp://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125886
Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:09:45 +0000http://zenpundit.com/?p=28656#comment-125886Some of this zen and I discussed in the comments of his post on Nixon and the Nixonian century.
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